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It being the TRUE anniversary of Baby Jeebus’s ™ birth, I was thinking about what we should get Prof. Poopyhead in celebration. Then it hit me…. but then I realised that we couldn’t wrap it …. but then I found this: Awesome Linky.

Totally random, but walking onto campus today through the myriad buildings, I encountered (what I assume to be) a patient who seemed lost. I asked her if she needed help, and she said she wanted to get to the main entrance, so I led her there.

On the way, she asked, “So, what do you do here? Are you a doctor?”

Me: “No, ma’am, I’m an analyst. I work with computers, mostly.”

Her: “So, what is it you analyze? Facts, or numbers?”

Me: “… Uh, well, numbers can be one kind of fact…”

Her: “Oh, yes, I suppose they can…”

She then started asking me about metastatis, to which I gave the generic but true answers (as well as telling her she should speak to her doctor for the specifics, since every cancer is actually unique, and pointing her to where our resource center was).

I’m all, “Bwuh?” Then I start hearing stories that X walked in on me masturbating to academic-ese.

ARGH… and of course, you can’t correct them because they won’t believe you over their own internal biases. Sheesh, I don’t know what ticks me off more about so-called normal people, the sex-phobia or the assumption that everyone lies.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

… We really need a “hot links” section. Either that, or I need to wake up more before posting (and check PET, since I see now it was there too). You right-coasters get first access to all the cool stuff.

*sulks in the corner**not really, but maybe someone will feel empathy for me and give me chocolate chips*

Personally, there’s nothing that isn’t made better by good gravy, though not all gravy is good for every situation. Buttermilk biscuits call for something substantial such as sausage gravy, whereas you want something more like jus—or even consommé—when your windshield is dirty (because of the aphids) and you’re all out of the stuff they sell you for the purpose.

Esteleth: Have you talked to your adviser about not having your thesis printed.

Often times they list degree requirements…and they DON’T list this stuff. I made it a point when they tried to make me do extra stuff at the end to say, “Look here – these are your graduation requirements. You have not listed these other things. I will have a lawyer write you a notice to sue for breach of contract. The amount you’ll get charged by your lawyer to read the damn thing is going to cost you more than you’ll get out of me in fees.

It’s your choice: I can pay this later after I make you lose more money than you’ll gain – by an order of magnitude at least; OR I can skip this and you can approve my graduation anyway.

I’m sick of this crap. It’s cheap. It’s nickel and dime when you’ve charged me more than enough already. If you can’t make it without these fees, then suck it up and take a tuition hike to the students or the legislature or whomever and justify it. If you can make it without these fees, you’re frickin’ gouging us. Either way, it’s wrong. There are graduation requirements listed and these ain’t them.

Now, admittedly, I was an undergraduate — it was not a PhD dissertation — but when the history department wanted to put two of my papers in the college library they paid to have them professionally printed and bound. Not a penny out of my pocket.

I had banana bread for breakfast. I was awesome.
The other night, I made a traditional dish of my family. It’s what results when Italians marry Swedes and then live in Maine. Swedish meatballs in a tomato-based sweet-and-sour sauce. It is amazing.

I like ’em with salsa, with sriracha & ketchup (mixed), with this ginger/sugar conserve I’ve found, with certain chutneys (yes, including tamarind), but most of all, I like to smother the hash browns in a layer of oily vegetables dominated by not exclusively containing mushrooms. In thick chunks. Mmmmm, steamy, greasy mushrooms.

Well, it seems that Michael Crook will now be leaving the mormon church. Or threatening to deprive the mormon church of his significant contributions. Or moving to another Stake, or something.

There was dust up over his profile appearing on mormon.org. Crook wrote enough blame-the-victim stuff that he managed to embarrass even the mormon church, whose prophets Crook had quoted in his discussions of rape.

Administrators of mormon.org made Crook’s profile unavailable to the public. This made Crook so angry that he appealed to his Stake President, and to other mormon leaders in the Rome Ward of Utica New York to stand up for him. Instead, Crook met a wall of indifference, resistance, and general lack of support from the brethren.

There’s even a mention of Boy Scout ties among the brethren that are unjustly persecuting poor Michael Crook. And happily for those needing some entertainment today, there’s use of vocabulary like “haveth” and “unrighteous dominion” — Excerpt below:

As my frequent, gentle readers know, I am embroiled in a situation that involves a priesthood leader not only exercising but full-on exhausting unrighteous dominion, but to make matters worse, it also involves some people in my own ward who haveth not the courage to confront me in person regarding an article I wrote. These cowardly few instead whine like sniveling cowards behind my back. It’s like high school, albeit a really retarded high school.

I’m not going to apologize for the post, or for anyone’s hurt feelings. Guess what? This is America, and I have the right to express my opinion. I quoted general authorities in context. Nothing I wrote about the topic of rape was out of line with Church doctrine and the teachings of current and past authorities.

And from yet another of Michael Crook’s posts on the subject:

This counselor just so happens to have a daughter-in-law who had issues with a prior article I wrote about a touchy subject, which she has admitted to having a personal bias over.

See ye not the problem?

1.) Daughter-in-law takes exception to my article.
2.) She runs to father-in-law.
3.) Father-in-law, who holds the proper authority, uses that authority to take an adverse, confrontational and downright treacherous action against me, without the knowledge of his superior and without informing my priesthood authority.

Reading between the lines, it seems probable that the Stake Counselor’s daughter-in-law’s “personal bias” was that she had been raped or sexually abused in some way.

One issue all this fulminating from Crook settles is the question of his possibly being a Poe. Nope. He’s for real.

And he has a wife. And it was his wife that talked him into becoming active in the mormon church again.

I like ‘em with salsa, with sriracha & ketchup (mixed), with this ginger/sugar conserve I’ve found, with certain chutneys (yes, including tamarind), but most of all, I like to smother the hash browns in a layer of oily vegetables dominated by not exclusively containing mushrooms. In thick chunks. Mmmmm, steamy, greasy mushrooms.

I’ve taken to making full Mexican breakfasts when the GF™ and I are trying to recover from the previous night’s festivities.

Frijoles refritos, huevos rancheros, and pilaf. If shots were involved, I swap out the arroz for parboiled and diced potatoes, and make a hashbrown ‘pilaf’ a lot like what you’re describing, Crip Dyke.

Mmm. Sriracha sauce, Red Hot—sometimes I really miss East Africa. A table wasn’t set without a bottle of pili-pili sauce (fries with ketchup?—weak), and the tilapia was divine.

Reading between the lines, it seems probable that the Stake Counselor’s daughter-in-law’s “personal bias” was that she had been raped or sexually abused in some way.

Well since rape is the woman’s fault anyway, of course the stake president is being evil in persecuting him! Of course, it’s not as if the church leadership is actually ashamed of blaming rape victims, they just don’t want the public to see; it’s just fine for them to push modesty for women who bear the moral responsibility for men’s actions, words and thoughts, they just don’t want to have non-Mormons hear about it before they convert!

Mormon rape culture is so lovely and charming here; every so often I ask myself why I still live in Salt Lake. Of course, I then answer that’s a stunning place to live and my family is here, but sometimes I daydream about moving somewhere just a little less anti-woman.

Esteleth, are WERE all of the members of your immediate family Swedish?

Sorry to have been so insensitive. Please accept the corrected version.
————–

On the Michael Crook issue, I just realized that in my retelling of the story I misrepresented the convoluted hierarchy of the mormon church, and therefore blamed the wrong party for abusing the hapless Mr. Crook. Let’s let Mr. Crook explain the hierarchy and the perfidy that flows therefrom:

In my statement, I alleged that the first counselor in the stake presidency of the Utica New York Stake exercised unrighteous dominion by ordering the disabling of my profile. I have evidence that he requested this without the knowledge of the stake president, who outranks him, and without informing my bishop, who is my priesthood authority, and should have been informed.

I knew that with that office would come more responsibility, so I again confessed to inappropriate conduct with a girl, though I didn’t take it as far as I did in my previous ward. I wanted to push off advancing in the priesthood and the additional responsibilities that would bring. I didn’t want to get out of a calling, or subject myself to more Church discipline that had nothing to do with actual transgressions.

I’ve started on my Christmas present crocheting. I’ve decided that everyone in my family gets something that I’ve crocheted because thread is cheap and I like crocheting. I’ve just started a scarf for my mother (it’s pink and wavy).

slignot, thanks very much for the updates on the latest flailings of the Prop 8 proponents.

I don’t mind the long posts containing lawyer speak. They illustrate the unaltered stupidity of the anti-gay-marriage forces, while also illustrating that their religious filters are so dense as to be almost impermeable to facts.

For ease of readability, you might consider inserting a few line breaks.

@Lynna, I’m glad that people like staying informed here and I’ll probably add some line breaks for any future spamming of TET. I usually follow a few different twitter accounts that livetweet on top of more formal coverage; the National Center for Lesbian Rights always has good coverage.

But the easiest to read and follow is the Prop 8 Trial Tracker, who always have someone covering the proceedings. As we found yesterday, livestreams are consistently underpowered for the number of people who want to keep up.

Reading this transcript makes the anti-gay marriage people sound like bigger assholes than they already do.

“Makes common sense point that a person in an enduring, committed relationship has, do you have an interest in getting married.”

That’s the argument from the guy on the “Walker should have disclosed his enduring, committed relationship before ruling” side. That’s their argument. He can’t be impartial on a case involving other assholes determining his right to marry—he’s too much a candidate for marriage!

I mean, what kind of a sick fucking society would let people in “enduring, committed relationships” get married?

Whenever I order something that’s listed as “with au jus“, I make a point of ordering it “with au jus juice”. And places that serve “avacado guacamole” can count on me asking for avacado guacamole sauce. ‘Cos that’s how I roll. With rolls of fat from ordering crap just because the menu was written for morons.

Is anyone familiar with truth-out.org or Williams Rivers Pitt? No idea if they’re credible, but if it’s accurate, this article is both shocking and totally not shocking.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

@Brownian, I’m consistently amazed by how badly the proponents handled the Perry trial/hearings. The trial was as amazing for the skill of Olson/Boies as it was the incredible incompetence of Cooper and witnesses. If you want to be just amazed, read transcripts of Blankenhorn’s testimony where there were times I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make a case for or against Prop 8.

Although perhaps nothing tops when Cooper was asked to comment at closing and told the court that they “didn’t need evidence.”

Whenever I order something that’s listed as “with au jus“, I make a point of ordering it “with au jus juice”. And places that serve “avacado guacamole” can count on me asking for avacado guacamole sauce.

Do you place your order with the fellow driving bus nearest the restaurant? Because s/he has about as much to do with writing the menu as your server does.

(You’d be better off doing so, given that the bus driver has less access to your food and his or her saliva.)

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Brownian: I dunno about that, but one of my really strange internet friends once asked me if the anus was capable of tasting. He told me after he eats too much onion, he can ‘taste’ it with his ass on the way out.

Unfortunately, I lacked the scientific knowledge to educate him further.

Is the anus capable of taste on some level? Or was it just his stink-fueled imagination?

Ha ha ha. I make chili sauce fairly often, from chilis of various heats. Even the mild ones, like costeños, can develop some “temperature”. You’re supposed to use gloves but that interferes with my dexterity when pulling out the seeds and skinning them, so I just bite the bullet and let my fingers “burn”. Somehow, since I know that it’s not really “hot” heat I can pretty much take it, and after a few hours, generally overnight, the feeling disappears.

However, the capsaicin does not entirely disappear, as W.U. informed* me one morning after such an overnight depletion of the pain sensors in my fingers, and the beginning of an, er, intimate, session.

*not by saying anything along the lines of, “oh, hunling, there still seems to be a bit of capsaicin on your fingers”. Nope. Not by a long shot. There was a bit of extra moaning, however.

“Is the sun over the yardarm?”
Somewhere for some pharyngulistas. So it’s always okay to imbibe.
+++++++++++++++++++
When folks talk about the ‘ring of fire’, as Benjamin so eloquently put it, it just means that it was so hot you decided to swallow to get it out of your mouth instead of spitting it out.

Bad decision. The original breakdown is done by saliva, if you can’t chew and enjoy the sensation, you shouldn’t have been eating it in the 1st place.

The hottest pepper I ever ate I swallowed to get rid of the burn rather than face the embarrassment of spitting the food out in public.
My stomach was smarter than me and immediately rejected it, along with everything else it contained.
Puking in public is so much more embarrassing.
So endeth today’s lesson.

I don’t do it to abuse the wait staff, I do it because I’m amused by silly stuff. I don’t lampshade it and it’s possible most of the time they don’t even notice.
I’m a firm believer in not inflicting pain and suffering on the poor slobs in customer service. I’ve been there.

Pack your bags – To help save the economy, the Government will announce next
month that the Immigration Department will start deporting seniors (instead
of illegals) in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs.
Older people are easier to catch and will not remember how to get back home.

What never ceases to blow my mind are the number of people whose livelihoods and well-being depend on Democratic-advocated programs (unions, Medicare, Medicaid, etc) who are mouth-breathing Rush Limbaugh-esque nutjobs.

So I saw a tweet today (I won’t link–go search if you want) that went “FACT: athiest(sic) CANNOT celebrate Christmas. #youreallhypocrites”

Oh, cuttlefish – you misunderstood.

She wasn’t grammatically inscrutable. She’s not incompetent with spelling.

What’s going on here is that she was using the superlative form of the adjective, “athy,” known to all Firefly fans as describing pompous, possessive, plutocratic jerks from Persephone who have probably never been within smelling distance of the Sundowner docks, often bully registered Companions as if it was okay to own another person, and like to skewer other men with swords to prove that it’s okay to be a real douchegabber if you have money…and spare time to practice the sword.

She was calling us the “athiest” people she knew. I would take it as an insult, except I’m just too stupified that she knows the Firefly universe that well to have any brain cells left with which to take offense.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

They are similar, yet are different in crucial ways. I tend to prefer home fries

When I’m cooking myself? Hashbrowns. Just easier since you can get decent ones pre parboiled & pre-cut.

But if someone else is cooking or if I have the time & my joints aren’t killing me, home fries.

it comes down to I like homefries a lot better than hashbrowns (usually, there’s one restaurant around here where I always get the hashbrowns ‘cuz there like no others & very good), but I like my joints and my precious spare time even better than homefries…

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@SandiSeattle, or, well, anyone: Any regular Pharyngulites that would wanna get together for fun & profit?

My uncle had the yardarm of a sailing vessel on the ground in the backyard on the ESE side of the house. At dawn the sun was over the yardarm.

======

A few years ago I was seeding and chopping about 5 pounds of Serrano peppers to freeze. My fingers tingled. Later that evening, wife and I got romantic. Let me just say that digital stimulation was unwise and leave it at that.

Sili, yeah, I agree, it appears Jeremy Clarkson got a bad rap. And I contributed to it. My bad.

He is a rich, privileged asshole, but he was just making fun of the BBC’s policy. The same could be pointed out about the US’s press, except they don’t make fun of it, they just are stenographers of ‘he said/he said’ journalism.

It has been an interesting lesson in public grieving. Society has become ridiculously Diana-fied since I was a kid.

Even the kids who knew the dead are a bit annoyed with the public outpouring of grief. They feel it inappropriate for people who didn’t know him to get so involved.

The school has handled things very well. Showing lots of compassion for those who suffer, but probably being a bit too lenient, meaning that some unaffected kids are taking this a licence to slack off – the was no registration of attendance Monday for instance, and today school closed at 11 to allow people to attend the funeral (no cremation oddly enough). Busses had been arranged even.

My freshmen have been very impressed with the principal by seeing a whole new side of him – they’ve been a bit at odds, since he extraordinarily teaches them physics (lack of new teachers), and this particular class is not exactly scientifically minded.

For those curious, everything is now public. Last I read was the autopsy implied he’d laid curled up one the tracks when the train hit him. Some kids speculated that perhaps he’d tried following the tracks home, but taken the wrong direction.

Not when I’m this poor, no. But I shan’t rule it out! I have a very good friend living in Seattle and another in Portland. I really WANT to visit them again someday. Just… the whole job thing. You know.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Sili, you claimed he did not: “… but he did not suggest strikers be executed.”; I posted a link to where he in fact did so.

Satirically, yes. Isn’t this what we call cherrypicking when it happens to people we like?

Thus my “satirically as it might’ve been intended.” :)

(I note one can’t pick cherries that aren’t there)

More to the point, cherry-picking refers to selecting specific cases that suit one’s contention whilst ignoring others that don’t. I made no contention other than that he did suggest that, contrary to your assertion.

I’m thread bankrupt, but it looks like there was some fun upthread. I’ll catch up.

For now, though, I need a bit of help, and I can’t think of a better bunch for this question: we need a name. Last night we adopted a beautiful little black kittie (f). Sweet as all get out, with greenish gold eyes. She seems thoughtful, and very affectionate, though not at first. I think she has to get to know you before you get accepted. We were thinking witches (duh, she’s black) so of course, Esmeralda (Esme) was my first thought (I hope you don’t mind, Caine). Then we thought scientists, and Ada (Lovelace) was the next natural choice. We also thought of Sophia (Brahe). So, witch, math genious, or astronomer? Any other great women I should consider? Healers, scientists, and midwives that we have neglected would be entertained.